Cosmopolitan Vision

by Beck, Ulrich; Cronin, Ciaran

• ISBN13: 9780745633992
• ISBN10: 0745633994
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-04-28
• Publisher: Polity

Summary

In this new book, Ulrich Beck develops his now widely used concepts of second modernity, risk society and reflexive sociology into a radical new sociological analysis of the cosmopolitan implications of globalization. Beck draws extensively on empirical and theoretical analyses of such phenomena as migration, war and terror, as well as a range of literary and historical works, to weave a rich discursive web in which analytical, critical and methodological themes intertwine effortlessly. Contrasting a 'cosmopolitan vision' or 'outlook' sharpened by awareness of the transformative and transgressive impacts of globalization with the 'national outlook' neurotically fixated on the familiar reference points of a world of nations-states-borders, sovereignty, exclusive identities-Beck shows how even opponents of globalization and cosmopolitanism are trapped by the logic of reflexive modernization into promoting the very processes they are opposing. A persistent theme running through the book is the attempt to recover an authentically European tradition of cosmopolitan openness to otherness and tolerance of difference. What Europe needs, Beck argues, is the courage to unite forms of life which have grown out of language, skin colour, nationality or religion with awareness that, in a radically insecure world, all are equal and everyone is different.

Author Biography

Ulrich Beck, Professor of Sociology, Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	x
Introduction: What is 'Cosmopolitan' about the Cosmopolitan Vision	1	(16)
Cosmopolitan identities, or the logic of inclusive differentiation	4	(1)
Cosmopolitan empathy	5	(3)
On the distinction between globalization and cosmopolitanization	8	(2)
Cosmopolitan Munich	10	(7)
Part I Cosmopolitan Realism
1 Global Sense, Sense of Boundarylessness: The Distinction between Philosophical and Social Scientific Cosmopolitanism	17	(31)
1 What is novel about the cosmopolitan outlook?	17	(7)
1.1 The distinction between philosophical cosmopolitanism and social scientific cosmopolitanization	18	(3)
1.2 The distinction between (latent) cosmopolitanization and the cosmopolitan outlook	21	(1)
1.3 The distinction between cosmopolitanization and institutionalized cosmopolitanism	21	(3)
2 Critique of the national outlook and methodological nationalism	24	(9)
2.1 Principles and errors of methodological nationalism	25	(8)
3 Towards a cosmopolitan social science, or the new grammar of the social and the political	33	(11)
3.1 Risk-cosmopolitanism: global public opinion as a side effect	33	(3)
3.2 Interference relations among side effects: post-international politics	36	(2)
3.3 The invisibility of global inequality	38	(2)
3.4 How everyday life is becoming cosmopolitan: banal cosmopolitanism	40	(4)
4 On the necessity and difficulty of distinguishing between emancipatory and despotic cosmopolitanism	44	(4)
4.1 Three historical moments of emancipatory cosmopolitanism	45	(2)
4.2 The human rights regime between perpetual peace and perpetual war	47	(1)
2 The Truth of Others: On the Cosmopolitan Treatment of Difference — Distinctions, Misunderstandings, Paradoxes	48	(24)
1 On the social treatment of difference	50	(7)
1.1 The two faces of universalism	50	(4)
1.2 The two faces of relativism	54	(2)
1.3 The two faces of nationalism	56	(1)
1.4 The two faces of ethnicism	56	(1)
2 What is 'realistic' about realistic cosmopolitanism? Whereas universalism, relativism, and nationalism are based on the either/or principle, cosmopolitanism rests on the both/and principle	57	(15)
2.1 Neither Huntington nor Fukuyama: cosmopolitanism means what is excluded by both positions: the affirmation of the other as both different and the same	58	(1)
2.2 Postmodern particularism	59	(1)
2.3 The reality test of cosmopolitanism consists in the common defence against evils	59	(2)
2.4 Is ethnic cosmopolitanism possible? The historicization of difference	61	(1)
2.5 Realistic cosmopolitanism presupposes nationalism, nationalism presupposes cosmopolitanism	61	(1)
2.6 The category of 'transnationality' is the contrary of all concepts of social order, and therein lies its political, but also its analytical, provocation	62	(4)
2.7 Critique of multiculturalism	66	(2)
2.8 From cosmopolitanization to the cosmopolitan outlook: how does awareness of really existing cosmopolitanism become possible?	68	(4)
3 Cosmopolitan Society and its Adversaries	72	(27)
1 Methodological cosmopolitanism	75	(3)
2 The three conceptions of globalization research in the social sciences	78	(5)
2.1 Interconnectedness	79	(1)
2.2 The new metaphor of 'liquidity'	80	(1)
2.3 Cosmopolitanization and methodological cosmopolitanism	81	(2)
3 More on the politics of perspectives	83	(2)
3.1 Forms and causes of conflicts	83	(2)
3.2 Forms and causes of integration	85	(1)
4 Qualitative research: the global can be investigated locally – the analysis of banal cosmopolitanization	85	(6)
5 Qualitative research: indicators of cosmopolitanization	91	(8)
5.1 Reflexive cosmopolitanization	94	(1)
5.2 Class analysis and cosmopolitanization analysis	95	(4)
Part II Concretizations, Prospects
4 The Politics of Politics: On the Dialectic of Cosmopolitanization and Anti-Cosmopolitanization	99	(31)
1 The average migrant: translegal, authorized, unacknowledged cosmopolitanism from below	103	(2)
2 Advocacy movements in global civil society: highly legitimate, precarious, mandateless cosmopolitanism from below	105	(2)
3 Class and power: disloyal (trans)legality	107	(2)
4 Anti-cosmopolitanism and its contradictions	109	(10)
4.1 Cosmopolitanization begets its own resistance	110	(2)
4.2 Everyone else may be able to shut their eyes to the cosmopolitanization of reality, but not social scientists	112	(1)
4.3 The prophets of anti-cosmopolitanism are forced to operate on the terrain of cosmopolitanization – this is what makes them so dangerous	112	(2)
4.4 Europe is the source of the Enlightenment and the counter-Enlightenment; modern anti-cosmopolitanism is part of the European tradition	114	(3)
4.5 Anti-cosmopolitanism suffers from a clinical loss of reality: cosmopolitanization does not disappear simply because we refuse to acknowledge its existence	117	(1)
4.6 Anti-cosmopolitanization movements propel cosmopolitanization	118	(1)
5 The cosmopolitanization of international relations	119	(44)
5.1 The question of legitimacy	119	(4)
5.2 The neonationalism of the international	123	(4)
5.3 Military humanism, or the paradox of the threat of war	127	(3)
5 War is Peace: On Postnational War	130	(33)
1 Pax Americana or global cosmopolis, global hegemony or global law	131	(4)
2 On postnational war	135	(5)
3 War is peace: human rights wars	140	(6)
3.1 The human rights regime becomes a counter-concept that affirms the divided world in its diversity and creates new hope for possibilities of action	141	(1)
3.2 The logic of law and treaties is fundamentally two-faced in world domestic politics: it civilizes states while simultaneously liberating them from the national constraints on power and violence	141	(1)
3.3 Human rights empower the powerless within states and expose powerless states to the military aggression of powerful states	142	(2)
3.4 The economy of war-for-peace, or why the world has not yet been consumed by a military conflagration	144	(2)
4 War is peace: war against terror	146	(8)
4.1 The war in Afghanistan and the Iraq War were unprecedented because they were the first wars in human history against a culturally generated risk	147	(2)
4.2 Terrorism unfolds its political power in the interaction between catastrophe and danger	149	(1)
4.3 The new master–slave dialectic of state and terror: on the political construction of the danger of terror	150	(3)
4.4 The danger of terror and its consequences: the demolition of social structures	153	(1)
5 Utopian perplexity: the new global order in the conflict of perspectives	154	(9)
5.1 The national outlook and the preventive irrelevance of the new world order	155	(2)
5.2 The new world order in the national-global outlook: Americanism versus internationalism	157	(3)
5.3 Self-critical cosmopolitanism, or the fear of utopia	160	(3)
6 Cosmopolitan Europe: Reality and Utopia	163	(15)
1 The European Union is not a club for Christians, a transcendental community of common descent	164	(4)
2 Cosmopolitan Europe is taking leave of postmodernity. Simply put: nationalistic Europe, postmodernity, cosmopolitan Europe	168	(3)
3 Thinking of Europe in national terms not only fails to understand the reality and future of Europe; it also (re)produces the self-obstructions that have become characteristic of political action in Europe	171	(4)
4 Cosmopolitan realism is not a utopia but a reality: it captures the experience of the Western alliance and the European Union and extends it for the age of global dangers	175	(3)
Notes	178	(3)
References and Bibliography	181	(15)
Index	196